Matthew Penkala

The abstract imagery of Matthew Penkala’s paintings strongly reflects his training and practice in photography. The diffusion of intense, hot color is punctuated by crisp elements that fragment the surface and create movement and tension across the picture plane. There is a luminous effect, inspired by the California light and landscape akin David Hockney’s early paintings.

David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times described the work: “Unlike so much of what makes up today’s visual landscape, Penkala’s paintings are slow burns. Combining the instantaneous appeal of eye-grabbing attractions with the lasting satisfactions of time-tested abstractions, his works treat viewers to luxuries rarely found in contemporary art: reverie and introspection.”

Penkala lives and works in Los Angeles. After receiving his BFA in Photography from Arizona State University, and his MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, he moved to Los Angeles, where he is currently a faculty member at Otis College of Art and Design, as well as the Academic Projects Manager within the Provost’s Office. He has also served as the Visiting Artist in Residence within the Painting Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Neiman Marcus Collection, Houston, Texas; Maxine and Stuart Frankel Collection, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and Daimler-Chrysler Permanent Collection, Southfield, Michigan, among others.

Matthew Penkala

Matthew Penkala Description

The abstract imagery of Matthew Penkala’s paintings strongly reflects his training and practice in photography. The diffusion of intense, hot color is punctuated by crisp elements that fragment the surface and create movement and tension across the picture plane. There is a luminous effect, inspired by the California light and landscape akin David Hockney’s early paintings.

David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times described the work: “Unlike so much of what makes up today’s visual landscape, Penkala’s paintings are slow burns. Combining the instantaneous appeal of eye-grabbing attractions with the lasting satisfactions of time-tested abstractions, his works treat viewers to luxuries rarely found in contemporary art: reverie and introspection.”

Penkala lives and works in Los Angeles. After receiving his BFA in Photography from Arizona State University, and his MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, he moved to Los Angeles, where he is currently a faculty member at Otis College of Art and Design, as well as the Academic Projects Manager within the Provost’s Office. He has also served as the Visiting Artist in Residence within the Painting Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Neiman Marcus Collection, Houston, Texas; Maxine and Stuart Frankel Collection, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and Daimler-Chrysler Permanent Collection, Southfield, Michigan, among others.

Matthew Penkala Statement

I construct these paintings visually and technically to initiate a place of interactivity and experience with the work in order to examine the dynamic potential of a static object. The paintings themselves are conceived by involving elements of cultural and geographic surroundings, as well as elements of digital representations culled from vast online sources to my own camera. I then conflate these elements by interposing them within a computer environment. The resulting visual construct and condition is then re-introduced and manifested by way of various painting languages and techniques as its own object/condition, or painting. A painting that introduces another set of fluctuating conditions, that presents itself as a dynamic object based in the qualitative realm of real-time perception. The use of dispersed particles of paint, visa vie an airbrush and spray gun, serve as an analogy to pixels and bits of information that constitute representations of contemporary reality. As a result, I intend to tie a reality constructed and modeled from representations and the virtual world of pictorial illusion with the physical interactive space created by the painting’s materials and hypnotic conditions. This positioning within the painting vernacular is to constitute and challenge the intimate relation between vision and intellect, abstraction and representation, the authentic and artifice, as well as experience and the thing experienced, be it real or representation.

By layering and dividing the visual construct of the painting, I intend to disperse the viewer’s attention and lead them to negotiate their surroundings. It also becomes reflexive with how boundaries are blurred between conditions we navigate through daily. The pictorial space within the paintings themselves is fragmented, and exploits conditions of optics, computer generated imagery, photography, cinema, and various design models and media. Though mixed, the paintings maintain an illusive, though not fixed, visual/meaning structure. By doing this, and by constantly making that which we wish or anticipate being certain, uncertain- visually or conceptually, a state of flux is created. The state of flux that is initiated is to keep thought active by a manner of unfixing or unsettling visual and conceptual models rather than fixing or concretizing them. So, not only do the actual paintings themselves sit within a state of visual alteration due to the viewer’s relation to it, the work also remains in flux within its conceptual condition.